A common complaint made by users of hearing aids is that background noise heard between speech input signals is unpleasantly loud and interferes to some degree with the hearing of segments of speech signals. U.S. Pat. No. 3,894,195 discloses means for providing additional gain to signals which because of their relatively short durations below a prescribed level are identified as speech signals and not low level background noise of relatively long duration. However, there is no squelching of such noise segments between speech signals which continue to interfere with hearing. Squelch circuits which remove or reduce high level noise signals are, of course, well known.